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When Steve Reidell bought the domain name thehoodinternet.com in 2007, he intended to use the page to show his friends the mashups he’d started making with bandmate Aaron Brinks.
“Aaron and I started listening to mashups by artists like Sammy Bananas and Them Jeans when we were both living in Chicago,” Reidell said. “It was also around the same time that Girl Talk released Night Ripper. We thought, ‘Hey, we could do this.’”
But unlike the countless others who have listened to Girl Talk and thought, “Hey, I could do this,” Reidell actually did it. The Hood Internet took off almost immediately, bolstered by buzz on influential music blogs like Gorilla vs. Bear. “The Internet caught hold of it, and we got a following right off the bat,” said Reidell, who quit his day job earlier this year to focus more on touring, including a stop in Poughkeepsie this week to open for The Flaming Lips at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center.
Christine Yu ’10, chair of Vassar College Entertainment (ViCE) Music, said that the Music Committee has been interested in booking The Hood Internet all year, but were waiting for the right time.
“It will be great to have an opener playing recognizable songs, to get people hyped up,” said Yu. Brinks and Reidell generally stick to the same infectious formula, pairing popular indie instrumentals with the vocals from popular rap songs. “We try to keep our live sets really fun and dancey,” Reidell said.
The Hood Internet capitalize on the popularity of the songs they remix. “People respond to things that they remember. Hearing something in a different context perks your ears up, and our songs reference two or three songs at once. They are an ADD mess,” said Reidell.
Reidell is hesitant to give himself too much credit for the success of The Hood Internet. “It’s not a super involved process,” he said. “In ways, mashups are like ice cream cake or cake batter ice cream. The credit for deliciousness must be given to the independent brilliance of the two ingredients, but you can’t forget about the genius who thought to combine them.”
“So far, The Hood Internet hasn’t built anything from the ground up,” he said. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference between a good mashup and a bad one. “It’s argued that anyone can make a mashup. That’s kind of true, but to be good at it there are certain things you have to have in place.
We don’t carelessly slap track A on top of track B. We cut up the songs to make them fit the same verse-chorus-verse structure. We make sure the keys match. The rapper’s flow has to have a cadence that complements the beat,” said Reidell.
Mashups can reveal hidden qualities in their source material. “I did a mix of Spank Rock and Burial that really works, even though the lyrics are very playful and the song quite dark,” Reidell said. In selecting song pairings, the duo seems to value the combative over the compatible. Reidell and Brinks set up their song names (and accompanying photoshopped images) as battles between opposing forces, as if to ask, “Who do you think would win in a fight: Snoop Dogg or Architecture in Helsinki?”
Pop songs can become engrained in the brain to the extent that their existence begins to feel like an inevitability. By decomposing and reconstructing popular music, mashup artists illuminate the countless choices that go into writing and producing a song. They can make you re-evaluate the inevitability of a song and think about where else the track could have gone.
Reidell and Brinks just finished a post-South by Southwest tour with the synth-heavy psychedelic band Tobacco. They are currently working on a mashup-free Hood Internet record. “It’s like the origin story of the Postal Service, except online,” Reidell said. “We write part of a song, then send it to other people who contribute parts. We’re still doing what we do, combining disparate elements, but this one we’re really producing.”
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